From Doc Searls I learned about an interesting company called SpikeSource. SpikeSource offers something that lots of companies thinking about using open source could use some help with: certified stacks of components tested and certified for interoperability.

This SpikeSource web infrastructure stack is composed of over 50 open source components, including 6 language runtimes, to form a complete development and deployment environment for dynamic web sites programmed in Java, C, C++, PHP, Perl, or Python. The complete package is tested for interoperability and performance on 4 major Linux platforms in a fully automated and repeatable validation process. It installs in around 10 minutes and works out of the box

From SpikeSource: Productized Open Source Software
Referenced Thu Oct 21 2004 21:22:53 GMT-0600

I work with companies using open source projects and without something like SpikeSource you have to do two things to make this all work:

1. Hire someone who knows there way around open source to put it all together
2. Spend lots of hours building a stack, testing components, and then making sure it all works together. Sometimes the bugs are subtle and hard to find (which the reason for step 1).

I don't think I'd eliminate step 1 even if I was using SpikeSource, but I'd sure love to eliminate step 2. Getting a certified stack that includes Apache, JBoss, MySQL, Tomcat, Axis, and Hibernate on top of my favorite flavor of Linux means that I can more easily forego the comfort that I get from WebLogic or WebSphere. This is one of the missing pieces of open source.